Unraveling Solitude: Judy Kronenfeld’s Mesmerizing Journey Through Apartness
In two of her most moving chapters, “Woosh!” and “Brief Dip into Ethnicity,” Kronenfeld focuses on her father. In the former, she accompanies him to his urologist appointment, during which, due to dementia, he forgets about his prostate cancer and repeats the same queries and responses. “Oh, I didn’t know,” “And how are the children?” and “woosh!” become a powerful litany of the lost when what Kronenfeld really “want[s] to know is how exactly he left Germany in 1934.”
In “Brief Dip into Ethnicity,” Kronenfeld joins forces with her daughter to fulfill her father’s wish to be buried in a casket affixed with the Jewish star—the casket they actually chose, “realiz[ing] even if I would never wear the star—how important it had been and was that my parents wore it for me, even in their deaths.” Despite her best efforts, once again she is made painfully aware of her “apartness”; the funeral home fails in its task. Nevertheless, her vocalization of the error leads to some sense of recognition (though still misunderstood), which allows her to own her grief. “My claim on the star had been registered. I could let it go. I heard the silence then, and moved into it: the long silence of my father’s death.”
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